(c) Dr Paul Kinsler. [Acknowledgements & Feedback]

Info

I run the Slackware distribution on several linux machines. (1) A Zenith '386 portable with 4M ram and 80M hd, I just installed only the stuff I needed, and compile new kernels on faster machine -- although I used to just leave it compiling overnight; (2) A '486 clone with 16M ram; X is a little slow, not due to a ram shortage (because it isn't swapping madly) but most likely because I have a (slow) non-accelerated video card. (3) A Pentium 133 with 64M and 2G hd. This has a /boot partition on /dev/hda1, a 128M swap on /dev/hda2 and the rest on /dev/hda3. The boot partition early on the disk means that the system will boot even on older bios's that cannot cope with large disks. In the past, I did not have a /boot partition, and so I first booted into dos; then used loadlin zimage root=/dev/hda3 ro to boot into linux.

  1. Remote file copy: I use rcp and rdist to copy files between trusted machines.
  2. X configuration: To start with, just stick in the generic defaults of (S)VGA xserver and (S)VGA monitor, and all should be well. And there is the XF86Setup graphical install prog, which took me only a few mins to use. OK, you want to fine tune stuff, you need to go fiddle about. But to get up and running takes little effort if you use XF86Setup. You did read the XFree howto's, didnt you?
  3. X without a mouse: I'm running Xfree and fvwm, and by default there are various key bindings allowing me to move the cursor -- shift-alt-cursor, trl-shift-cursor, and ctrl-alt-cursor. You can do other stuff too, but I haven't really looked at it -- my mouse works fine as it is.
  4. PLIP and SLIP: See the scripts below to see how to set them up for a point-to-point IP link. Since 8.0 I seem to have a problem getting slattach to work, so I've switched from slip to ppp for fixed serial links.
  5. Tape+Floppy conflict: The floppy-drive and the tape drive conflict with each other, and cannot be used simultaneously. So make sure your kernel has floppy support as a module (you might need to recompile you kernel), and before using the tape driver, unload the floppy-module from your kernel using /sbin/modprobe -r floppy. This (most of the time) works for me. See the Ftape-HOWTO, section 4.4
    [1] You might need to recompile your kernel, with floppy support as a module.
  6. slirp
  7. mgetty+sendfax
  8. Oops!: You might like to bear in mind that if you compress your login files (such as .cshrc, .kshrc, etc) you might logon and find you only have a default path (as your shell rc file wasn't there); thus making it a real effort to get anything done -- such as uncompress your files.
  9. Why is that "find" process thrashing my hd?: This is probably updatedb being run by cron. It build a database of all the files on your system, so you can locate files easily, and much faster than using find.
  10. Two IDE i/o cards, both with a single IDE interface: You've tried using both in the same machine at once, but the machine hangs at boot (when the bios prints "WAIT...") -- but both cards work by themselves. Here both cards are trying to use the same irq or i/o addresses, and the conflict is hanging the computer. The normal values for the IDE controllers are irq 14 with i/o=0x1F0, and irq=15 with i/o=0x170. However (says Bernd-Ulrich Adrigam) most of the single IDE-cards don't allow you to change I/O-address or IRQ, but there are some IDE-cards declared as "IDE-CD-ROM-card", that allow to change these things. Those cards often allow IRQ- and I/O- settings beside the standard-settings for IDE. If either card has the right jumpers (says Mircea), the irq and i/o of one can be changed and they will work together without problems. If you have the right jumpers, but no info, change them one at a time, boot linux (off a floppy might be easier), then look in /proc/interrupts, /proc/ioports, /proc/pci, you'll get some info about each card, and it will give you a way to monitor the changes you're making.
  11. Want to upgrade your serial chips to the better 16550A's?: The consensus seems to be to buy a new card instead, as the price of two new chips is likely to be comparable. It'd cost me about 5 pounds for each new chip (unless I wanted them in bulk), so it's better to find a second-hand card with 16550A's; or a cheap new card, which would probably cost under 20 pounds. I also recall reading somewhere that some serial chips calling themselves 16550's were in fact 16550A's, so you may want to check to see if those "16550's" work ok anyway.

Config files

I got pretty tired of tweaking various scripts that I wrote differently for each machine. To fix this, I rewrote them to make the scripts portable, but referring to files in a new /etc/CONF directory, where these files say what device to use for the mouse, what the default slip/plip destination is, and so on. To start with I had files with multiple data fields, but I decided that I wanted the rc script in particular to be robust, and not rely on awk or sed, so I now have a single file for each piece of information. 

Auxiliary info:    /etc/CONF/aux
                   /etc/CONF/aux/mouse
Devices:           /etc/CONF/dev
                   /etc/CONF/dev/mouse
                   /etc/CONF/dev/modem
                   /etc/CONF/dev/slip
Network Info:      /etc/CONF/net
                   /etc/CONF/net/boot            (see use in rc.inet1)
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/broadcast
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/gateway   (optional)
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/netmask
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/network
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/dev
                   /etc/CONF/net/ether/ip
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip/ip
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip/gateway    (optional)
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip/netmask
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip/psdev
                   /etc/CONF/net/plip/ptpip
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/dev
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/gateway    (optional)
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/ptpip
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/speed
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/ip
                   /etc/CONF/net/slip/psdev

Date=20010916 0616 19990323 Author=P.Kinsler Created=19990323

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